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ddemchukon An Open Letter to Matt Cutts & the Google Web Spam Team

Have you ever tested your opinion? There are many varieties of SEO, from proper information architecture and subtle keyword targeting techniques to blatant spam.

Saying you hate SEO with a passion is like saying you hate all people who drink beer with a passion. Just because some people are alcoholics doesn't mean you can (or should) write off the entire group.

ddemchukon Ask YC: Starting today, how would you most quickly earn $1M in profit?

Promote the latest affiliate offers with large media buys on demographically targeted high traffic volume niche sites.

ddemchukon Ask HN: Specifically, how did you get your first 100 (B2B) paid customers?

I'm not at 100 users yet as I have just "launched", but I can guarantee I'll hit 100 users within the next 30 days because I am EXTREMELY active on a very popular internet forum that is directly interested in what I'm building. I'm currently individually referring users but will be launching publicly on Monday on that site, and it will be the channel I will build my business from.

A lot of equity can emerge from giving people a lot of free help and advice on forums. If there exists one that applies to your niche, go help people as much as you can, and you'll start off with a captive audience when you launch

ddemchukon Deploy to Linode and wait or go direct to AWS?

The reason you should go with Linode (or any other dedicated or VPS host) over a cloud solution is if you can predict your growth. Cloud solutions are useful for rapid scaling, but tend to be overly expensive over long periods of time. Traditional servers are harder to scale quickly (arguably) but end up being cheaper usually.

ddemchukon Add recurring billing to your site. No coding, monthly fees, gateways. Code=HN

Guys, net 60 payment on other people's money is absolutely absurd, beta or not. It's obvious you're attempting to bootstrap by using the cashflow of your clients payment processing to grow, but that's not ok in this niche. Raise capital or self fund and do Net 7 max.

ddemchukon How CoffeeScript makes jQuery more fun than ever

I guess I could be ignorant here, but I don't really feel that Coffeescript makes things easier/more elegant/better than just using jQuery. I'm not particularly a fan of abstracting abstractions in the first place so I'm probably biased, but I find jQuery to be clean and concise already. An example from the article:

$.post(

  "/posts/update_title"

  new_title: input.val()

  id: something

  -> alert('done')

  'json'

)

All coffeescript really did there was remove the commas and subtly change the syntax. That's not an improvement at all, it's just a lateral syntax change. If anything, the lack of commas almost makes it harder to read.

Why change to coffeescript and add another step (compilation of coffeescripts) into the mix when jquery was already pretty good to start with? Just seems like its something that would make it hard to take on new coders when your business starts scaling because they would need to know yet another meta-abstraction.

ddemchukon The Don Stewart Method: write code every day, release a project every week

I think a better variation of this method is to break down your big projects into 1 week iterations for new features. It will feel like new projects each week, you'll be adding value to a product rather than starting fresh each week.

When you're not just hacking and instead trying to profit and run a business, you need to be constantly improving and iterating.

ddemchukon Ask HN: Can't get signups. Any advice?

You have an intimidating signup form. You really just need email and password, everything else will be gathered when they pay you later on anyways.

Creating a system to let people build without an account yet might be hard to work into the current app workflow, so maybe create a demo account that resets every 30 minutes or something so they can login and see what they're getting themselves into without committing to anything?

ddemchukon Twitter To Buy TweetDeck For $40 Million – $50 Million

Gross revenue means nothing, profit is the only thing that matters. Considering they have $360 million[1] in VC, and no mention of actual profitability after 5 years, they're pretty high on the "Most Successful Failures" list still.

1. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/twitter

ddemchukon Twitter To Buy TweetDeck For $40 Million – $50 Million

The day Twitter reports MAKING $50 million dollars rather than SPENDING $50 million dollars will cause celebration on the streets filled with champagne and delight...until then, they're just a giant spam channel with a lot of VC

ddemchukon Ask HN: Good web service to detect proxied IP addresses?

spam is spam though. everything has a footprint, and systems like akismet can detect those.

ddemchukon Ask HN: Good web service to detect proxied IP addresses?

you can probably sign up for and integrate with Akismet's API and that can help quite a bit.

ddemchukon Delicious founder on site's potential: 'The time has passed'

They have a perfect platform for social recommendations. They could rival stumbleupon, reddit, and many others utility-wise simply because they have such detailed profiles of all of us based on our bookmarking habits.

ddemchukon Ask HN: My blog has disappeared from Google for no reason, can anyone help?

There is absolutely no correlation between having a high Page Rank and outranking competitors. Go search for "hacker news" in google and you'll see that www.thehackernews.com (a PR 0 url) outranks twitter.com/hackernews (a PR 6).

The reason your site dipped out of the rankings is because when Google crawls a site and there have been significant changes to the structure (new theme, new internal linking structure, missing pages, etc), they yank you out of the index in order to reevaluate your proper position before moving forward. This can take a day, a week, a month, or half a year to recover; there is no way to predict how long it will take.

Try and replicate as much of your old site's structure as soon as possible, and just give it time.

ddemchukon Ask HN: How do you advertise niche blog sites?

tip of the iceberg. Try experimenting in an unrelated niche with an exact match domain. I'm sure you'll be surprised at the results.

ddemchukon Interviewing with YC? Don't overstep the limits like us (but be close)

These guys certainly seem mature and professional enough to run a company, especially funded with other people's money

ddemchukon $1.39 for 1000 decoded CAPTCHAs

Two of the bigger ones:

1) if you're using a popular CMS platform, ELIMINATE ALL FOOTPRINTS. Change all url strings from the default, remove standard text/descriptions on signup and comment forms. Kill anything that can be scraped against the rest of the installs to hide your own sites from the scrapers the spammers use to find you.

2) Tap into distributed spam prevention systems. Akismet is probably the most popular example. Your single site will most likely miss the indicators of a spammer, but a system like Akismet can see the 10000 links all pointing to the same url in one hour and lock things down for you.

I've legitimately thought about doing a talk at a Wordcamp one day called "How I Spam You" that just walks people through how to spam wordpress, so they can then go protect their sites.

ddemchukon $1.39 for 1000 decoded CAPTCHAs

forum spamming is far too expensive if you're paying for captchas. There is an extremely famous/popular forum spamming software on the market (made by russians) that internally solves captchas.

If you're going to forum profile spam, you'll go broke paying for captchas.

ddemchukon $1.39 for 1000 decoded CAPTCHAs

sure. Familiar with a link wheel? Basically creating accounts at major authority sites (wordpress.com, blogger, blog.com, etc) and then posting articles to those sites that link back to your site you're trying to rank for.

Using something like Celerity or Watir for Ruby, combined with this captcha service, you can essentially automate the entire process.

Building a bot to do something like that really teaches you a ton about how you would prevent such activity on your own systems.

ddemchukon $1.39 for 1000 decoded CAPTCHAs

I've burned through thousands of credits at deathbycaptcha on some "darker" projects of mine, they have a nice service. Depending on the kinds of links you're building, they can be extremely cost effective. If you're going for high volume crappy links, they aren't worth it.

here's a good ruby library for using this service: http://rubygems.org/gems/deathbycaptcha

ddemchukon Ask HN: What are your side projects?

I'm going to build a bulk Whois service that responds in well structured JSON to privately license to people. I'm working on another project that needs access to that data so I need to build it anyways, and I'm sure a dozen or two people would like access as well.

I'm planning on using Sinatra and Redis for it too, so yay.

ddemchukon HireFire - The Heroku Worker Manager

Does anyone know of gems like this that will work on standard VPS servers? I'm launching something that completely depends on Delayed Job for processing data and would love an interface to manage queues and number of workers spun up at a given time. Also, visually watching the queue (a la resque) would be amazing.

The best I've found so far is: http://trevorturk.com/2011/01/21/delayed_job_admin-a-simple-...

ddemchukon White Hat SEO: It F$#ing Works

this is most likely what is going on

ddemchukon Viddler serving 1,500 requests for video per second

Thanks for the reply!

ddemchukon Viddler serving 1,500 requests for video per second

I would love to read a post about it, I'm a huge fan of reading about people's scaling and architecture decisions. Thanks for the reply!

ddemchukon Viddler serving 1,500 requests for video per second

anyone know of posts about their architecture of scaling adventures? I'd love to see how they're handling all of that.

ddemchukon How to damage your brand in one smooth shot - Way to GoDaddy

This is going to have about as much effect on GoDaddy's userbase and bottom line as did all of the privacy concerns last year with Facebook.

A sliver of a fraction of GoDaddy customers will ever see that video or even hear about it. Most people buy domains there because they have hot chicks in super bowl commercials.

ddemchukon Accidental SEO: How I got 400,000 page views without even knowing it

The golden rule if you want to become a good SEO is to not take Matt Cutts (or anyone at the big 3 for that matter) at face value when they say things. Test test test.

Traffic (and Analytics data) absolutely has an effect on your rankings. As mentioned above, it's part of the QDF effect

ddemchukon Accidental SEO: How I got 400,000 page views without even knowing it

It's well known that traffic and SERP CTR has a significant impact on rankings. About a year ago, I wrote a post on my blog about how to write a bot in Ruby using Watir, and I submitted it here. Within 24 hours, I had gotten over 1000 uniques and had a front page ranking for the term "ruby bot" and "ruby web bot". I run Google Analytics on my blog, and Google has provisions in its algorithm to account for "breaking news" and because my site rapidly received traffic and links, they chucked it up onto the front page for these terms.

I've maintained the rankings because of the links I received during that traffic spike as well as the traffic coming in through the search engine results. What better way for Google to test whether a site is actually decent or not than to rank it quickly because it's getting traffic, then keep it there or drop it based on the CTR and Bounce Rate of the site? It's possible to game these metrics, but not as easily as something like link or content spam.

For reference, the blog post is: http://www.layeredthoughts.com/automation/how-to-write-your-...

ddemchukon Show HN: Profile.io - Profiles for Developers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzVJFv9GyJg

Seriously though, I hope you realized that the best thing to do when someone has XSS issues is to just tell them rather than EXPLOIT them.